Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Migration trends, Mass deportation, Border wall parts

Due to end-of-year staff vacation time, WOLA will not publish Border Updates for the next two weeks. Updates will resume on January 10, 2025.

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

• Signs of at least a modest pre-inauguration migration increase

November data showed migration levels at the border continuing to decline following Donald Trump’s election, to such an extent that, for the first time, port-of-entry arrivals exceeded Border Patrol apprehensions. Still, some reports from Texas point to an increase in mid-December as some people try to reach U.S. soil before Inauguration Day. Rumors sent some migrants to attempt to turn themselves in at a border wall gate in El Paso, where state forces repelled them violently. Caravans continue to form in southern Mexico, but none remain intact beyond Mexico’s southernmost states.

• Mass deportation

As Trump administration officials ramp up plans to deport undocumented migrants on a massive scale likely requiring the use of military aircraft, concern is sweeping throughout communities where many families are “blended”: citizens living with non-citizens. Fear is spreading in south Texas, while council members and law enforcement in San Diego disagree on cooperation.

• Auctioning unused border wall segments

Conservative media and Donald Trump complained bitterly about the Biden administration’s auctioning off of border wall parts left over when construction halted after Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. In fact, the selloff was mandated by the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Signs of at least a modest pre-inauguration migration increase

November data

Border Patrol apprehended migrants 46,612 times at the U.S.-Mexico border in November, according to data that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) published on December 19. That is the smallest monthly apprehensions number since July 2020, a few months into the pandemic during Donald Trump’s first presidency.

For the first time probably ever, the number of people who came to the border’s ports of entry, mostly with CBP One appointments (47,578, green in the chart below) exceeded Border Patrol apprehensions. If, as expected, Donald Trump does away with the CBP One appointment program for asylum seekers after his January 20 inauguration, we can expect Border Patrol apprehensions (blue in the chart) to revert to being a multiple of port-of-entry encounters again.

Combining Border Patrol apprehensions and ports of entry, 94,190 people ended up in CBP custody in November 2024, the fewest since January 2021. This total is 61 percent fewer than in November 2023, which was one of the border’s busiest months ever.

Data table

Of nationalities CBP reported with over 100 migrants in a month, all declined from November to November. The steepest drops were in encounters with citizens of Nicaragua (-87%), Romania (-83%), Peru (-83%), China (-81%), and Ecuador (-80%). The nationalities that declined the least from November to November were Cuba (-43%), Turkey (-48%), Mexico (-52%), Venezuela (-54%), and Haiti (-54%).

Some possible increases

Even amid continued declines through November, modest signs point to a possible increase, over the past week or two, ahead of Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration.

The chief of Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector in south Texas, who usually posts an informal tweet about the previous weekend’s security data, reported 1,276 migrant apprehensions over the December 14-15 weekend. That is far more than the 400 to 600 that the sector had been reporting for months, and the most for any weekend in 2024, tweeted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, who also noted increases in mid-Texas’s Del Rio Sector. It is the first quantitative indicator of an increase in migration since the U.S. election, which raised expectations—so far unmet—that many migrants might rush to enter the United States before Election Day.

International Migrants’ Day rumors in El Paso

Along the Rio Grande in El Paso, dozens of migrants arrived on December 18 across the narrow river from a gate in the border wall where, before a June Biden administration rule put asylum out of reach for unauthorized border crossers, many asylum seekers would regularly come to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents. They may have been responding to false rumors— addressed on the Border Patrol El Paso Sector Twitter account—that U.S. authorities were commemorating International Migrants’ Day (December 18) by allowing asylum seekers to cross and turn themselves in without first making port-of-entry appointments using the CBP One app.

As is now their custom, even when there is no apparent self-defense justification, Texas National Guard troops fired pepper-ball projectiles at some of the migrants. “A girl was hit in the face, and a man was hit in the chest; we had to run him out, fainting and unresponsive, and the ambulance had to take him away,” a Venezuelan migrant told EFE.

“Caravans” in southern Mexico

The Mexican daily Milenio charted the paths of six migrant “caravans” in recent months that were all dispersed by Mexican authorities long before they got as far as Mexico City. Migration and security agents prevent motorists from driving “caravan” participants. While all six groups managed to walk out of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, authorities stopped them elsewhere in southern Mexico: five in Oaxaca and one in Veracruz. Many families are finding themselves stranded in Oaxaca, the daily reported separately.

La Jornada reported about an attempted caravan of about 1,500 people departing Tapachula on December 15. Milenio covered another similarly sized group departing Tapachula on December 18.

“No major caravans have reached the United States in nearly six years,” the Washington Post recalled, in a piece explaining methods Mexico’s government employs to diffuse or dismantle large groups of migrants traveling through its territory. “But while caravans have become a ho-hum issue in Mexico, they continue to alarm American politicians—and one in particular.”

Reporting from Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas and its environs for TruthDig, Madeleine Wattenbarger documented the brazenly open nature with which organized criminals operate as they massively kidnap migrants for ransom. “Rather than deterring organized crime, the military’s presence has coincided with an increase in migrant kidnappings.”

Mass deportation

Reuters published a demographic overview of the undocumented migrant population vulnerable to “mass deportation” from the United States, which it estimated as ranging from 11 million to 14.5 million people.” The latter estimate comes from the advocacy group FWD.us, which reported that “Of those, 10.1 million live with a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, what’s known as a ‘mixed-status household.’”

Tom Homan, the former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official who will serve as White House “Border Czar” after Donald Trump takes office, told the Washington Examiner that ICE will need additional military aircraft, beyond its fleet of about 13 private contractor planes, to send migrants out of the United States. While the next administration’s “mass deportation” campaign will first target migrants with criminal records, Homan added, it will be likely to carry out many “collateral arrests” of others accused of no offenses except unlawful entry.

Despite Homan’s pledges to ramp up deportations on day one of the Trump administration, “mass deportation plans rely on others’ cooperation. And the Constitution provides guidance and protections to meet this moment,” recalled Josh Rosenthal and Shayak Sarkar of the University of California at Davis, in a column at Newsweek.

CBS News and the Guardian profiled Federico Arellano, a U.S. citizen living in Texas, whose undocumented wife and four children—three of them U.S. citizens—got deported by ICE after she reported for an appointment with the agency. The attorney representing the family “said he has not seen an instance like this one that involves a family.”

The New York Times reported on undocumented migrants living near the border where Border Patrol operates, many of whom live with U.S. citizen family members, who “fear that they will be easy targets.” An organizer for La Unión del Pueblo Entero, a migrants’ rights defense group in south Texas that estimates 75,000 children in the Rio Grande Valley region live in “blended families,” warned a gathering “to have a plan in place in case they found themselves in an immigration jail, including securing power of attorney to give custody of their children to a legal resident so that their children would not end up in foster care.”

In San Diego, county officials plan to oppose mass deportation operations, but the Sheriff’s office, which is independent, wants to cooperate with them, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans should be very, very nervous because (Trump officials) are going to push the boundaries of the law,” former Biden-era ICE official Jason Houser told the Associated Press, in a report about the likely massive economic and social impact that mass deportations may have on Central American nations.

Faced with mass deportation, Zachary Mueller of immigrant rights group America’s Voice told the Border Chronicle that advocates’ response must go beyond organizing just around specific issues like immigration policy to encompass “widespread antiauthoritarian coalitions.” The group’s former director, Frank Sharry, co-authored an article in the Atlantic criticizing some migrants’ rights activists, including “self-described ‘abolitionists,’” for abandoning pragmatism in the fight for immigration reform.

A New York Times feature told the story of Jaime Cachua, an undocumented immigrant in Rome, Georgia who may face deportation although he has lived in the United States since his infancy. Many of Cachua’s relatives and colleagues, in a conservative area represented by exuberantly pro-Trump Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), voted in November for a candidate whose policies may deport him.

Auctioning unused border wall segments

The fact-checking site Snopes addressed outrage in conservative media and comments by President-Elect Trump about reports that the outgoing Biden administration is auctioning off bollards and other border wall parts left over when, in January 2021, Joe Biden ordered a halt to construction begun during Trump’s first term. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act included a provision requiring the Defense Department, which was charged with much wall-building, “to use, transfer, or donate” all “excess construction materials on the southwest border.” The Department had sold the materials to an auction platform in June 2024, months before Trump’s election.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), a border and military policy hardliner, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin demanding that the Department keep all records related to the sale of border wall materials.

Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick (R), said that the state decided not to purchase any of the wall materials because they were “mostly junk, with most panels covered in concrete and rust.”

In other “border barrier” news, the New York Times reported that in late 2022, the Biden administration seriously considered installing a “wall of buoys” to block migrants from crossing the Rio Grande. In mid-2023, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), a sharp critic of the administration’s border policies, installed a similar floating barrier in Eagle Pass, the administration challenged it in federal court.

Other News

• The Biden administration on December 18 issued a rule allowing asylum officers to apply “mandatory bars” to asylum access early in the process, during credible fear interviews usually held while asylum seekers are in custody at the border. “Mandatory bars” in the law exclude from asylum or withholding of removal any applicant believed to have committed serious nonpolitical crimes, terrorism, or human rights abuses, or poses “a danger to the security of the United States.” The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s response to commenters insisted that “the population to which this rule will apply is likely to be relatively small.” Rights defenders told Newsweek that the rule increases the likelihood that asylum seekers could be deported to danger without due process.
• A report from Human Rights Watch, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and Yale Law School’s Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic provided a detailed account of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that led to more than 4,600 migrant children being separated from their parents in CBP custody. The report found that the Trump administration’s actions met the definitions of “enforced disappearance” and “torture.”
• A court-ordered monitor’s report on conditions for children and families in CBP’s holding facilities, reported by the Associated Press, found improvements to hygiene, food, and medical care but found that the agency still routinely separates children from adult relatives—usually not parents—with whom they traveled. A court settlement mandating independent review of children’s health conditions in CBP custody, the consequence of several child deaths in custody, is to expire at the end of December.
• ProPublica reported more deeply about migrant family separations that continue to take place at the border, citing over 300 cases in the past year. CBP separated about 80 children from their parents for “national security” reasons; this happens most often to families from Russia. Separated children spend an average of 75 days in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody before being released to sponsors.
• Writing for Houston Landing, Anna-Cat Brigida detailed the journey of a Venezuelan mother and kids seeking to be reunited with the father who had migrated to Texas earlier. They must make numerous payments to criminals, in the Darién Gap and throughout Mexico, to avoid being harmed until finally securing a CBP One appointment.
• At the El Paso Times, Jeff Abbott spoke to relatives in Guatemala of some of the 40 migrants who died in a March 2023 fire at a Ciudad Juárez detention facility run by Mexico’s migration authority (National Migration Institute, INM) after INM agents locked them inside the burning building. (See WOLA’s March 31, 2023 Border Update.) The INM is paying each victim’s family about $200,000 in reparations; families now worry about being extorted by organized crime.
• INM Commissioner Francisco Garduño, who left office days ago after more than five years in the post, faces criminal charges related to the incident. In remarks, he insisted on his innocence. Garduño’s replacement is Sergio Salomón Céspedes, the outgoing governor of Puebla state.
• Agents from Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector provided training to INM personnel across the river in Ciudad Juárez, the city’s Norte newspaper reported. The subject matter was organized crime, but the content of the training was not detailed.
• The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights commemorated International Migrants’ Day (December 18) with a profile of the Casa del Migrante in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, whose outspoken leadership in defense of migrants’ rights has brought threats from organized crime.
• Doctors Without Borders issued a report on the humanitarian crisis of migrants in southern Mexico after performing medical consultations on over 1,900 of about 10,000 participants in 12 caravans in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Veracruz between September and December. These and other migrants trying to pass through southern Mexico suffer violence with near-total impunity for the perpetrators, which “ranges from torture to sexual violence, kidnappings, robbery, threats, deprivation of water and food, burns and extortion.”
• Mexico’s Interior Ministry “went from registering 37 cases of sexual violence against migrant women in 2021 to 275 in 2022, an increase of 643 percent,” Milenio reported. “The majority (181) occurred in the state of Chiapas, the gateway for migration from the south of the continent.” The article recalled that northeastern Mexico, especially the state of Tamaulipas, is also notorious for such violence against migrants; migration expert and former official Tonatiuh Guillén called it the “Mexican Darién Gap.”
• After a visit to two regions along Colombia’s border with Venezuela, human rights expert Ligia Bolívar found that the number of migrants exiting Venezuela is up only slightly since July 28, when the government refused to recognize the opposition’s victory in presidential elections and unleashed a wave of repression. Opinions are divided, Bolívar wrote in Colombia’s El Espectador, about whether migration—some of it U.S.-bound—might increase after January 10, when Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is likely to be sworn in for another term.
• The director of Panama’s Migration Service, Roger Mojica, said on December 17 that 305,549 migrants, 70 percent of them Venezuelan (209,070), had crossed through the Darién Gap jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama since the beginning of 2024. That is a significant decline from the 520,085 migrants who passed through the dangerous route in 2023. Mojica’s figure is 8,195 more than his agency had reported through November, which means an average of 512 people per day crossed the Darién during the first 16 days of December. While that is relatively low by the past two years’ standards, it is an increase from November’s average of 371 per day, which was the lowest since April 2022. Mojica added that 51 deportation flights had departed Panama, mostly to Colombia and Ecuador and mostly with U.S. funding, since early August, and that he expects the pace of flights to increase after Donald Trump is inaugurated.
• “The trees along the route have colored ribbons tied around their trunks. Blue: the right path. Red: danger of drowning due to rising rivers. Black: imminent threat of death,” reads a report from the Darién Gap by Juan Diego Quesada in Spain’s El País. The account notes that smuggling on the Colombian side of the Gap continues to be largely controlled by the Gulf Clan, a paramilitary group charging migrants “$350 per person, with a discount for children.”
• Some migrants have attempted a more expensive U.S.-bound route that avoids the Darién by traveling by boat to Nicaragua, across the western Caribbean, from the small Colombian island of San Andrés. The U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment against three Colombian smugglers, arrested on December 13, whose route included a boat that disappeared at sea with 40 migrants aboard in October 2023.
• A report from the Center for Engagement and Advocacy in the Americas (CEDA) documents how Ecuador’s worsening organized crime violence, economic turmoil, and environmental crises are spurring more external migration and internal displacement. At the same time, the country continues to receive Venezuelan migrants and a growing number of Colombians fleeing violence. “To avert a deeper humanitarian crisis and deter irregular migration, the United States and other international partners must maintain and adapt their support, prioritizing humanitarian assistance and root-cause solutions over security-focused measures alone,” the report recommends.
• In his Americas Migration Brief newsletter, Jordi Amaral highlighted five “migration trends to watch” in 2025. They include the region-wide ripple effect of Trump’s mass deportation plan; the unclear future of the Los Angeles Declaration framework for managing migration; and the persistence of push factors on migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
• A brief from UNHCR reported that 8,135,302 people are internally displaced—essentially, refugees who do not cross an international border—in 5 Latin American nations: Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, and Mexico.
• Litigation in Arizona revealed the identities of three Border Patrol agents who fired their weapons at 58-year-old Raymond Mattia in May 2023, killing him on his doorstep in the Tohono O’Odham nation’s territory. Though prosecutors declined to pursue the case, Mattia’s family members filed a suit in federal court.
• Jeffrey Kanas, an agent with CBP’s Air and Marine division, was killed on December 16 when the helicopter carrying him crashed in rural Southern California.